After work, working out, and playing outside with Ivan a few days ago, I had on the following ensemble: brown work pants, orange Fig Newton T-shirt, purple cardigan, black socks, and bright orange crocs. As he’s yelling at me to come outside, I looked down and said, “Wait, how did this happen? I look insane.”

He looked me up and down and said, “You look sweet.”

We went outside to play catch and I had to stop a few times to admire my outfit. I look sweet! I felt that awesome four-year-old freedom that comes with looking like a four-year-old. I sort of have a modified version of this wardrobe anyway, but full-on color madness gave me a jolt. Or else it’s the German in me coming out, because Germans don’t get how to match colors.

About 70 folks (I think) came to hear me read and talk about Opa Nobody, which was sooooo wonderful. Yay to the Book and Cranny in Statesboro for all the help, and to Eric Nelson & his posse for the beautiful food, and to my son for drawing on my face while I was trying to sign books.

In other good news, Booklist says of Opa Nobody: “[T]houghtful discourse on political activism and the toll exacted from those dedicated to unpopular causes.”

In the wake of the Margaret Selzer fake-memoir scandal, it was discovered that the author of “Reflections in the Pond,” a meandering work of literary nonfiction, was also assuming a false identity. Dr. Arno Schwartz, the mild-mannered professor who readers knew as the author of “Reflections,” was revealed to be Shazaam Waloon Walker, former knife thrower, sword eater, and bounty hunter.

Waloon Walker published “Reflections” to little acclaim, no advance, and sold approximately 1,700 copies of the work, which was published by a now-defunct “indie” press, Seventh Jackal Books. Over time, however, the literary value of the work brought it into such demand among panelists at literary conferences that a second indie press, Nine Horned Beast Words (now also defunct), scraped together enough support for a second press run of 150 printed by hand with letterpress.

“Reflections” enjoyed modest name recognition among a handful of name-tag checkers at regional literary conferences, and might have faded into the comfortable obscurity of the indie has-beens if it hadn’t been for the industrious blogger, Snarfling Lorax. Lorax, a bedridden consumptive with an axe to grind against the literati employed as first-year composition teachers with 4-4 teaching loads at community colleges, combed through the manuscript and announced on his blog yesterday that “Reflections” was indeed an utter fabrication.

“The walks in the woods? A lie. The hazy metaphors connecting the cycle of life to the color of the birch leaves? This guy has never been more than seven feet from either a car or a pool table,” wrote Lorax on the blog post. Lorax cited the key discovery of “Reflections” as a hoax: a reference to Schwartz/Waloon Walker visiting Walden Pond on Long Island. “Jesus Christ,” wrote Lorax. Literary fans of “Reflections” had assumed the gaffe was a knowing and subtle commentary on American relationship to its literary history.

“I just wanted some respect,” said Shazaam Waloon Walker in a phone interview. “Every girl I met, it was always about the scars on my face, the questions about the decades I spent as a drug mule, and the knife throwing–especially the knife throwing. I love the alphabet…but who would have thought me capable of stringing a metaphor?”

“I wasn’t in it for the money, obviously. I can rustle that up anytime I want. I didn’t want to write about my low points and devour my own life for the sake of a huge advance…What do you think I am, some sort of corpse-eating zombie? I wanted what no money can buy. I wanted the quiet and unremunerated satisfaction of somebody who’s just into the alphabet. I guess love affair with a good story was my downfall. I’ll never be anything but a knife-throwing sword-swallowing former drug mule.”

(A little short story, a joke and a lie. The Onion wouldn’t publish it because it wasn’t funny enough. No, that’s a lie, I never submitted it to The Onion.)

These are a few selections from a wonderful new book from Ohio University Press, Thomas Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist:

“Only by lingering on something outside the self, with which he has had intimate experience, can the author disclose himself. Memoir is a relational form.” (22)

“[T]he subject of a memoir is often the self in search of an earlier or later self, who is found in the person the book gives birth to and whose awareness of past and present, in turn, becomes the focus.” (66)

“What is it about you now that’s so interested in whatever stage you choose? Pressure from the now may help unearth the best phase to explore, especially the unfinished ones that haunt us the most.” (67)

“[T]he memoirist is she who sticks with the form long enough to undergo changes in how she sees the past. The act of memoir writing and its river of recollections has made her different from the person she would have been had she not traversed the rapids. The act has also changed and deepened those predictably indulged and semitrue stories she’s been telling herself and others, no doubt, for years.” (113)

“Once we realize that the here and now has the greatest control over the personal narrative, we are saying, in effect, that the core self can never be found. It can only be activated now and in the succession of now’s memoir writing activates.” (131) (Cool, very Buddhist!)

“Unlike the sum-happy autobiography or the sin-absolving confession, memoir allows a reanimation of, and a relational bout with, one’s authenticity.” (135)

“I think there’s a powerful link between creativity and death. We make things because we lose things: memories, people we love, and ultimately our very selves. Our acts of creation are ways of grappling with death: we imagine it, struggle to make sense of it, forestall or defeat it. When I sat down to write this essay, I realized that all my work–in film or on the page–has ultimately been about dying, and I know I’m not alone. These media are, quite literally, mediums, the means of traveling to the other shore. They are our imaginative transport to the land of the dead. We learn things there, and then return what we learn to the living. This journey is undertaken by anyone who has ever told stories, from Homer, to Dante, to Elizabeth Bishop. To tell stories is to practice of the art of losing.”– from “The Art of Losing: On Writing, Dying, & Mom” by Ruth Ozeki in Shambhala Sun March 2008 p. 73

I got this random piece of paper in an envelope yesterday and it turned out to be my first review. from Kirkus Reviews, dated 1/15/08. Okay….they’re not my mom, so they found stuff that I totally agree with: “the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing.” And also “The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication.” (well, I’d call that fiction and a mixed-genre thing while trying for honesty, but these are quibbles.) Here comes the good part:
“Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read. Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.”

I walked around the house kind of dazed, and then a half an hour later I said to Donny, “Wait, I think this is a good review.” It is a good review. Bumpy is okay–hell, they could have said hellishly incomprehensible and galling for even existing. “worthwhile,” “unique,” “imaginative…” aww, and they don’t even know me So I’m relieved and glad for such a strange book to be liked.

Today is the first day of class. I have put on an extroverted and caffeinated version of myself. I’ve had conversations with writers about whether or not teaching is “good” for one’s writing, and I think I’m in the category of those whose writing is served by teaching. On good days, I feel as though the conversation in my classes stokes the fire of my own writing by making me consciously articulate the things I care about it writing, the routes I believe are most effective for producing good writing. But some days, too, there’s just an exhaustion that makes the alphabet seem foreign, from space. I have one class to go and I wonder what I should do with these minutes to “refresh” so that talking about writing is not a deathless abstraction.

So I am just getting into the job of being one of the creative nonfiction editors of Literary Mama, an awesome e-zine. I haven’t edited in a while, and I have never had the position of having to select from so many submissions. This will be interesting–like anything else, especially dealing with students and colleagues, I find that a long list of things to do can make me want to be curt and brief with responses. But I am usually in the reverse position, of getting the rejections. I think the letter style I hate the most is, “It was excruciatingly difficult to choose, and we wanted to pick everyone, but we forced ourselves, almost against our better judgment, to reject you.” The style I hate second-most is the Zen-koan brevity of “Not for us.” (That was a real one recently…an online journal that was too busy to type the word “thanks” or to sign the email.) I vow this small vow: I will write “thanks,” because that’s the most important.

Wow, this is amazing. Just got the book jacket illustration today. Makes it seem somehow real!

From The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

“I told her that I, too, was interested in facts, of course, that we had started out on this long series of journeys because we wanted to find the facts. But I said that because of what we’d heard on our trips, I’d also become extremely interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them. What they revealed about the people who told them, I said, was also part of the facts, the historical record.” (p. 411)

“I did and do believe that if you project  yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something happen that would not otherwise have happened, you will find <span style=”font-style:italic;”>something</span>, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked your grandfather anything at all. I had finally learned the lesson taught me, years after they’d died, by Minnie Spieler and Herman the Barber. There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking, and finally seeing, what was always there.” (p. 486)

The book is incredible. Read it.